There's a review of American Gods in the New York Times Book Review, at http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/books/review/RV112648.html. It seems a fairly positive review -- and is the first time I've been reviewed in the Times since 1990 (for Good Omens). (They never mentioned Sandman in the years it was being published, although we learn here it is respected.) It's obvious that the reviewer didn't have a great deal of room, so she basically just does a plot summary. But I am now officially "A fine, droll storyteller" (The New York Times). (Which makes me sound a little like an after-dinner speaker -- "So an English God, a Norse God, and Buddha walk into a bar...")
Tidying up some videos I ran into an old clip of Tori performing Silent All These Years on the Jonathan Ross show, circa 1991; Clive Barker and Anne Bobby were on the same tape. Everybody -- Tori, Jonathan, Clive and Anne, looked so young.
(There was a nice man at the Victoria signing, who said "I saw you on PRISONERS OF GRAVITY on TV ten years ago. And you don't look any older now. I guess you have a portrait in your attic, huh?"
"I do," I told him. "And the weird thing is, it looks this age too."
But the truth is, I pretty much look my age, I think.)
Anyway, I promised I'd donate something to one of the RAINN auctions -- I might donate that tape,although probably it's something that the Tori fans all have copies of and would yawn at. (How does one find out these things?)
Changing the subject, this in from Publishers Weekly.
Gods' Odds…
by Daisy Maryles -- 7/9/2001
News > Behind the Bestsellers
…are looking especially rosy at this point, as Neil Gaiman's American Gods has been garnering excellent reviews and is being supported by publisher Morrow's aggressive and innovative marketing campaign. Thanks to the carefully conceived February launch of a dedicated Web site (www.americangods.com), suspense built rapidly for the book and, according to assistant publicity director Dee Dee De Bartlo, it "was one of Amazon's Top 100 weeks before it was available." (On-sale date was June 19; copies in print total 83,000 after three trips back to press.) "It's flying out of the stores at record speed," De Bartlo adds—a pace that will certainly pick up, given Gaiman's just-concluded a 10-city coast-to-coast tour. (No rest after that, however, as his 10-city U.K. tour started last Saturday, and will be followed by a three-city Canadian tour.) The author is perhaps best known as the creator/ writer of the monthly cult DC Comics horror-weird series Sandman, which won him the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for best writer every year from 1991 through 1994. Harlan Ellison, who knows a thing or two about dark fantasy novels, calls Gaiman's latest "alarming, charming, even winsome," and its author "serially inventive, surprising, purely remarkable."